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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsBreaking: Carly Fiorina and HP Scammed Taxpayers Out Of $4 Billion
The Daily Beast has just released a troubling report which seriously calls into question her judgement and motivations as a CEO and her moral integrity as a person. It also indicates just what kind of a opportunistic and heartless patrician she really is.
Under Fiorina, Hewlett-Packard heavily lobbied the U.S. government for a tax holiday the Homeland Investment Act of 2004. Piteous moaning about the burden of having to pay corporate taxes and how it was restricting them from creating jobs was met with open arms by the George W. Bush Administration, which bent over backwards for the oligarchs and gave them a tax break on money earned overseas. Their tax rate was dropped from 35% to 5.25%, and HP saved $4.3 billion dollars.
Fiorina then decided that her personal finances were more important than the workers of her company or even the health of the company herself, and poured four billion dollars into stock buybacks, where a company artificially inflates its own stock by putting its own money into it, funneling the profits directly to Fiorina and the shareholders- which was specifically prohibited in the tax holiday bill in the first place.
http://www.occupydemocrats.com/breaking-carly-fiorina-and-hp-scammed-taxpayers-out-of-4-billion/
As CEO, she lobbied for a tax holiday on corporate profits to create jobs. Instead, the money was used to buy back stock while HP fired 14,500 workers.
...
Take, for example, the cynically named Homeland Investment Act of 2004. The bill was passed as part of the equally cynically named American Jobs Creation Act of 2004 after intense lobbying with Hewlett-Packard in the forefront.
The purported aim of the legislation was to generate economic growth and therefore jobs at home by according corporations a one year tax holiday on billions in overseas profits they had stashed offshore.
The result was a $265 billion corporate giveaway.
The windfall was supposed to go toward research and development, and other job-creating endeavors.
Instead, almost all of it was put into stock buybacks as a way of funneling cash to stockholders, these prominently including CEOs.
Never mind that the bill prohibited such buybacks.
...
Hewlett-Packard saved more than $4.3 billion and put more than $4 billion into stock buybacks. It laid off 14,500 workers.
To make it all even uglier, Hewlett-Packard lobbied for the Homeland Investment Act as a member of something called the Homeland Investment Coalitionthis at a time when the war on terror was intensifying and the word Homeland made everyone think of national security.
...
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/09/23/carly-fiorina-s-4-billion-job-scam.html
kairos12
(12,881 posts)busterbrown
(8,515 posts)Will be the beginning of the end for this heartless thug..
CTyankee
(63,912 posts)they've been giddy on Carly for days now. They gotta get real...
busterbrown
(8,515 posts)of this and all the other crap she has done.. They play to their base audience.. Repubs and low info voters who by the way are intelligent, but just dont follow politics closely.. They follow it but not closely..
If she starts threatening Trump.. Trump will let this crap fly.. Just like he did with Walker..
47of74
(18,470 posts)randys1
(16,286 posts)democrat.
There arent enough teapartiers, alone, to elect a president, however.
Rex
(65,616 posts)Glad this is coming out now, she needs to be exposed for the grifter she is.
This isn't some loosely supervised subsidiary doing something. Massive stock buybacks do not happen without CEO approval. Nor does the layoff of 14000+ workers.
Rex
(65,616 posts)Let THIS be her downfall!
Bucky
(54,087 posts)He only rips off taxpayers by manipulating bankruptcy laws and only dodges few billion bucks at a time.
Fiorina does it to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars, makes The Donald look like chump change.
HughBeaumont
(24,461 posts)Utterly fucking disgusting. Swaths of America still buy the trickle on nonsense. The wealthy are not your friends, people.
Wellstone ruled
(34,661 posts)Blus4u
(608 posts)Is a drop in the bucket compared to the $265 billion skimmed under the Homeland Investment Act of 2004 where the bulk of that money went to the companies' stock buy back program.
Stock buybacks were prohibited under both of these pieces of legislation. Too bad we don't have a government which seeks to recover these illegally obtained funds for the American taxpayer.
Peace
ion_theory
(235 posts)The repugs will just say all that means in she is a good business woman and show how our government impedes that. At this point they could have proof that she hasn't paid taxes since 1975 and she'd go up 5 points. Shameful shit...
erronis
(15,382 posts)ion_theory
(235 posts)Love them to death, but the right-wingers always seem to be the least educated, most racist, least interested in actual policy and legislation, least empathetic toward others, and over 35 y/o (and this doesn't refer to more 'experience,' but old ways of thinking), and more nihilistic than those one the left or moderate. Also when politics comes up in the discussion, it's always them who actually get angry and start making arguments based on emotion and subjective reasoning.
Wounded Bear
(58,737 posts)Being a tax cheat and general grifter will sit well with her base.
hibbing
(10,110 posts)Many of them will think this is admirable.
Peace
Kingofalldems
(38,496 posts)Unknown Beatle
(2,672 posts)It instead reminded me of Fatherland and/or Motherland and it had nothing to do with national security and patriotism. Instead it reminded me of the PTB telling we the sheeple into believing that war was a good thing. I never fell for it but I know many people that still believe such bullshit. But I digress.
Carly Fiorina, if elected president, would utterly destroy any semblance of this country we have left. She would treat this country as her own personal HP.
dae
(3,396 posts)her shenanigans while at HP but not this. Hope her exposure causes her campaign meltdown.
certainot
(9,090 posts)carson. he may have had a hint of this so now he can say "see?"
meanwhile he recounts stories of how he could call rove to have a short talk with bush
CanonRay
(14,121 posts)well, she's in the right party.
TrollBuster9090
(5,955 posts)Hey, only in America!
Duppers
(28,127 posts)Thanks, Catherina!
rladdi
(581 posts)A false, outright LIE. This is the woman that wants to be our leader. She lead HP in losing half it value, while taking home tens of millions as she got fired by the board of HP. She has made some of the worst decisions that any leader could make. But we understand that the Republicans run failed people as their candidates for Presidents.
WillyT
(72,631 posts)Octafish
(55,745 posts)Thank you for the heads-up, Catherina! This puts the final torpedo into the face that shipped 30,000 lunches overseas.
ChairmanAgnostic
(28,017 posts)in some quarters of the GOP?
red dog 1
(27,875 posts)President Carly Fiorina?....God help us all!
hifiguy
(33,688 posts)Kick/rec for visibility.
Vinca
(50,318 posts)Apparently she's now embellishing on her debate Planned Parenthood lies. The sad part is, the dim bulbs never bother to check out the truth.
davidpdx
(22,000 posts)Personally I like HP's products, but I dislike both Fiorina and Whitman.
Spirochete
(5,264 posts)with that revelation...
TeamPooka
(24,264 posts)Mnpaul
(3,655 posts)Congress in 2004 passed the act as part of the American Jobs Creation Act. Under the Homeland Investment Act, businesses were given a one-time deduction of 85 percent of U.S. taxable incomes for extraordinary dividends received from their controlled foreign corporations, with some limitations. That made the effective tax rate 5.25 percent, compared with the normal 35 percent, according to the IRS in a 2008 study.
http://www.crn.com/news/channel-programs/240161618/the-2004-homeland-investment-act-ripple-effects.htm
AJCA: The most absurd corporate tax giveaway of 2005
http://primary.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2006/04/the_104_billion_refund.html
Many Democrats, including Clinton, bought into it.
https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/108-2004/s211